Life Imitates Art

For his first directorial effort after several years in the Japanese film industry, Kazuyoshi Okuyama has created a blend of historical fact and fantastical fiction that recalls such films as Hammett or Kafka and then proceeds to surpass them.

Edogawa Rampo (Naoto Takenaka) was the premier Japanese mystery writer of the first half of the twentieth century; his name is a phonetic approximation of one of his literary mentors, Edgar Allan Poe. Like Poe's mysterious stories, Rampo's work seems to blend the dark side of human psychology with a vague atmosphere of unrealness. The Japanese censors refuse to give their approval to a story that he writes about a woman who locks her husband in a trunk. He burns the manuscript, but then his agent shows him a newspaper clipping about a real-life case mirroring his story. Rampo gradually becomes fixated on the woman accused of murder, Shizuko (Michiko Hada), following her and developing a friendship with her.

But halfway through the film, a remarkable transition occurs. When Rampo himself can explore no deeper into Shizuko's life, he begins to write a story in which his favorite character, the suave detective Akeshi (Masohiro Motoki), begins an investigation of the woman, leading him to the manor of a very depraved Marquis (Mikijiro Hira). Soon, the detective hero is reduced to the status of observer, and when events begin hurtling beyond his (and Rampo's) control, the author himself breaks into the story in a desperate, scrambling attempt to save the woman he loves. I don't completely understand the series of images which end the film, but they provide a stunning and haunting climax to the complex narrative that Okuyama has crafted.

The Mystery of Rampo displays one of the richest, fullest cinematic techniques of any film of the last five years. The ending is spectacular enough, but it is neatly balanced by an opening that blends a sequence explaining the significance of the hope chest in Japanese culture, newsreel footage of Japan between the world wars, shots of Rampo's library, and an animated version of the story from which the entire mystery springs. In another sequence, one which gave the film a certain amount of notoriety in Japan due to brief flashes of frontal nudity, the Marquis presents overlapping images of pornographic films and then seems to wedge Shizuko into the visual swirl. And throughout the film, Okuyama displays a steady and studied hand with the camera (aided by the stunning cinematography of Yasushi Sasakibara). His exploration of the relationship between imagination and reality recalls the work of such diverse cinematic masters as Alain Resnais, Alfred Hitchcock, the David Lynch of Eraserhead and Blue Velvet, and Japanese filmmaker Nagisha Oshima, but does not seem in any way derivative of them. A weaker director might have lost his way in the complexities of this story and produced a jumbled, incoherent mess, but Okuyama organizes his material with coherent, pervasive themes and motifs that captivate the viewer's eye as the Mystery of Rampo unfolds.

-- Jesse Garon